Genesis: A Living Conversation.

Turn it and turn it, for there is everything in it." That's what the (probably) mythical and (certainly) wonderfully named Rabbi Ben Bag Bag is quoted in Talmud as saying about the study of Torah, which is the Law, which is the first five books of the Tanak, which is what Christians call the "Old" Testament, and which-along with the works of Plato and a couple of plays of Sophocles - is the iron architecture, the psychic DNA, of the Western idea of the self. There is no appeal from this judgment. If you are a jew, a Christian, or a Muslim, or even a heretic or atheist or looney-tune cultist, as long as you exist in Western culture you live and think under the all-but-unbearable weight of this uncanny, inescapable text. Somebody once said brilliantly that every saxophone player after Charlie Parker was a witness to his genius, because the only possible choices were to choose to sound like Bird, or - perhaps even greater bondage - to choose not to sound like Bird. Multiplied a thousandfold, that is the pressure of Torah.

Turn it and turn it, for there is everything in it. Ben Bag Bag's counsel is the very heart of the tradition of rabbinic biblical commentary and interpretation, or Midrash. And therefore it is also the. heart of all Christian exegesis, from Augustine to Luther to Karl Barth or Karl Rahner: reading Augustine's commentaries on Genesis, you cannot escape the conclusion that you are reading an especially heterodox, and therefore, delightful Midrash. There can at this point be little doubt that the Christian world learned to read Scripture - learned to read altogether - from the heroic and still ongoing labor of the rabbis. Nor can there be any doubt that, as Harold Bloom observes in Omens of Millennium (Riverhead), "One of the many unhappy oddities of the contemporary United States is that so many of us are Bible-obsessed yet have never read the Bible."

That's why the Gideon Society, founded in Wisconsin in 1898, seems to me such a noble and peculiarly American enterprise. To put Bibles in every hotel room in the country; to replace them when they,re stolen - that is a mitzvah, a very good deed.

And that's also why the PBS series, "Genesis: A Living Conversation," premiering October 16, is also a mitzvah - although not an unmixed one.

"Genesis" is a ten-part series of conversations with Bill Moyers, Moyers being by now highbrow TV's Johnny Carson, that is, the perfect and perfectly bland host against whose solid edifice of incomprehension better minds can rebound their best shots: it,s a distinct talent. He is also, as the publicity packet for the show emphasizes, a former divinity student, and the producer of myriad PBS shows exploring the" world of ideas." What better guy to host a series introducing, Gideon-wise, the first book of the book of books to a nation not of traveling salesmen, but of arm-chair travelers, accidental tourists on the information superhighway?

As my great teacher, Judah Goldin, was fond of saying, the sense of Midrash, like the sense of Talmudic commentary, is that of an ongoing, endless, exhilarating conversation about an inexhaustible tale. (This, by the way, is what secular literary criticism also ought to be, but almost never is.) And in this respect, "Genesis" comes beautifully close to the rabbinical or exegetical ideal.

Each program focuses on a particular episode from Genesis. In order of presentation they area: Cain and Abel; the first creation story; the temptation in the garden, Noah and the Flood; Abraham and Sarah in Egypt; Abraham, Sarah, Hagar, and Ishmael; the akedah, the sacrifice of Isaac; Jacob conning his way into the birthright; Jacob's wrestling match with the "angel," where he wins the name, Israel; and Joseph's exile and triumph in Egypt. Those are certainly the stories most people know - or think they know - from the book. At the beginning of each episode, a storyteller, either Alfre Woodard or Mandy Patinkin, narrates the tale. Then Moyers and seven other people - writers, rabbis, ministers, priests, feminists, near-fundamentalists, painters, Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus - have I missed anybody? - sit around and talk about the story. That's right: just talk.

It's a risky plan: these are not the controlled one-on-one conversations - lectures, actually - that Moyers had with Huston Smith or Joseph Campbell in previous series. This actually is conversation, verbal tennis with no net and no outlines, and it can veer, as does Midrash, at any moment into the sublime or the absurd. In fact, as I watched the first show - the one about Cain and Abel - my instant reaction was that this was one of the silliest and most self-congratulating damn things I'd ever seen on TV - and I'm a guy who has actually watched "Wheel of Fortune." "Mass-produced feel-good glop," I snorted to my wife after the first half-hour (although I didn't really say "glop"): "this is McMidrash."

Nor was I altogether wrong. I'll get around to talking about the annoying lapses of the series eventually. But what needs to be said first, and loudly, is that it all, after all, works.

And it works mainly because - I can't say this too often - it's actual conversation. Think about how weird that is for TV. The "talk" shows, of course, are little more than shouting machines - like being raised, I guess, in an alcoholic household, the news shows are instructive to the degree that they indicate how pathetically incapable anyone in national politics is of conveying human information at all, and the pundit shows ("McLaughlin Group," "Brinkley," etc.) are elaborately stylized dances of clashing egos, as finally boring as the mating dances of cranes or the tango. But these folks really talk - just as the rabbis or the amoraim (the writers of Talmud) do - and they talk about specific things: what does the serpent mean in the story of the Fall; why does Abraham in Egypt tell Sarah to pretend to be his sister; how could God play the savage trick on Abraham of asking him to sacrifice his only son Isaac? And so on and so on. And some very stupid things are said, and some very lovely things are said. (My heart leapt when Burton L. Visotzky, arguing with a Christian apologist about the arbitrariness and injustice of the Flood, said, "I have to believe that God is large enough to contain my anger"; that is good enough to have come from Hillel or the great Akiba.) The point is that it is talk, real talk, by a total of thirty-nine participants, about things that really matter - or the Thing that Really Matters - and as such a living proof that human discourse survives even in the medium, of all media, that seems most designed to obliterate it. I have never been a fan of Bill Movers. But for this series, he deserves a large measure of gratitude. In my next column, I will do some criticizing.